Film Review I Am Not Madam Bovary

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Spoiler alerts - 2016 Tonight's movie review, doubling as today's diary, as little more went on today is a very good Chinese comedy drama shown at the Preston based International Film Festival. The film was preceded by a short entertaining appreciation talk on Chinese Cinema history, followed by free Chinese snacks including fortune cookies and Wasabi. The film itself stars Fan Bingbing as a village peasant, Li Xuelian. She has come off badly when a scam she and her husband organized backfires. With Chinese Law stipulating that families can have only one child (a rule later repealed) and only own one house, the couple have staged a fake divorce so they can buy separate homes and then remarry. The scheme has failed because the husband has married a different woman, leaving Li Xuelian with nothing. When she tries to sue her husband she faces an indifferent chain of authority figures and vows revenge on them and her husband. She is angered mainly as the stress has caused the miscarriage of her baby (a major reason for her trying to get the new house). Though her ten year protest causes a few government officials to lose their jobs (for failing to see her stance as a consequence), others are more resistant but fearful of what she might do next. Ironically she has given up her crusade feeling she is getting nowhere but efforts to spy on her and talk her out of it end up making her start her battle again, but it is all or nothing as her ex-husband dies in an accident so she has nothing to gain anyway. After contemplating suicide she ends up working as a waitress, and meets the first lawyer whose career she crushed. They forgive one another. The government officials are not bad men. They just fail to see the impact of their big decisions on the ordinary citizen but recognize how a single leaf can affect the fate of the whole tree. Sometimes funny, but ultimately a very sad story told at a calm pedestrian rate but never dull. The UK trailer makes it look like a murder mystery but though the heroine tries to hire assassins early on in the film, she gives up on the idea quickly The trailer used here is much better Arthur Chappell